DogTown (31 page)

She was talking to someone who has seen Wiggles’ picture on the Guardian Angel website and was interested in adoption. (The site is meant to find adoptive homes for special-needs dogs like Wiggles.) “We’ve also noticed that he has a little bit of, um, stress incontinence as well. Sometimes poop just kind of falls out of him, but it’s easy enough to clean up. We’re just looking for the right home, somebody who can love him and deal with all that.”

Kristi made no effort to “sell” Wiggles or to pretty up his picture in a less than honest way. She is interested only in finding adoptive homes for Dogtown residents that have the best chance of being permanent, which means one where everybody knows what they’re getting into, and where everybody winds up happy. Failing to mention Wiggles’ most embarrassing social shortcoming would only make everybody unhappy—and probably would get Wiggles sent back to the sanctuary.

The family on the phone was very interested in Wiggles, but there was just one problem: They had a cat. Was Wiggles cat tolerant?

“Well,” said Kristi, “we’ll just have to give him a cat test and get back to you.”

In a cat test, a dog has to face a friendly cat and not show any aggressive behavior (which, given the age-old rivalry between canines and felines, is no mean feat). Luckily, there are plenty of cats to go around at Best Friends—Cat World is just up the road from Dogtown. So Betsy Kidder, a caregiver who had been fostering Wiggles at her home for the past few months, drove him up to the cat sanctuary for his feline stress test.

The cat chosen for Wiggles’ test was a small butterscotch-colored male named Piggy, who is very friendly with dogs. Kristi brought him into the room in a small animal carrying crate. Piggy peered out with big eyes as Betsy held Wiggles by his leash five or six feet away. Though he did not know it, Wiggles’ hope for a real home could well rest on this moment.

“He’s just a
character
—there’s no way to describe him unless you can just see him,” Betsy said to Kristi, regarding Wiggles. “He’s a joy to have at home, he’s hilarious.” Now she was clearly fighting back tears. “He just has a great personality. I love him! If I could keep him, I would. I’ll miss him.”

Kristi, who has long red hair and freckles, knelt on the floor to bring Piggy out of the crate. As Director of Adoption Services, her job is to place the right animals in the right homes for them and their individual needs. It’s a big responsibility, one that Kristi takes very seriously. Part of her job with Wiggles was to help find out what kind of home was the best match for him. If he passed the cat test, then he could be adopted out to a family with cats. If kitties were a problem for Wiggles, then his perfect home would be cat free.

Kristi lifted Piggy out of the crate and onto her lap. Piggy, spotting Wiggles, hissed like a snake. Wiggles lunged forward, straining against the leash. He did not seem hostile or overly aroused, just curious and happy, wagging his tail. But Piggy saw things differently. He lashed out with a paw, smacking the air and hissing in an extremely threatening manner. The two animals’ energies started to feed off each other. Wiggles grew more agitated, jumping forward, barking and excited. Betsy tried to distract him with a dog treat, but he was not interested. He just wanted to get after that cat.

“Hmm,” observed Kristi, “it’s not looking good. Piggy clearly is saying, ‘I don’t feel too comfortable with this dog.’”

But more important, Wiggles didn’t feel comfortable either. And if he couldn’t be distracted away from the cat, it would be a sign that his behavior would be difficult to curb.

So Wiggles, unfortunately, didn’t pass his cat test. His chances for becoming a member of this particular cat-loving family dropped to zero. And now that he needed to find a cat-free home, in addition to one that welcomed his odd disabilities, his odds of ever finding a home at all became even slimmer.

LIFE AS A BIRD DOG?

A few months later, a family in Colorado saw Wiggles’ endearing, toothy countenance on the Guardian Angel website. They put in an application to adopt him, but this time with a different caveat: They had four tropical birds in their house, including a parrot. So now Wiggles had to pass a bird test, to see if he could share a house with parrots, and hope to do better than he did with the cat test.

“We basically custom-tailor adoptions so they are adoptions for life,” John Garcia explained as he drove up the road from Dogtown with Wiggles in the front seat of his truck. At Best Friends, arranging for a bird test would be as simple as arranging for a cat test—the sanctuary includes a sprawling aviary for abandoned birds, called Feathered Friends, where about a hundred birds are generally in residence at any given time.

“It’s kind of embarrassing to admit this, but I have trouble with birds,” John said. “It’s not that I had such a bad experience with birds as a kid or something, it’s just that…well, they really creep me out!”

He drove up the road to the aviary, parked, and leashed up Wiggles. Then the two of them strolled into an outdoor courtyard where there were a number of pagoda-shaped cages filled with noisy, colorful tropical birds.

“Hello,” a big, blaze-colored parrot shrieked.

“Hello?” John said. “Whoa, that’s creepy!”

One of the bird handlers, alerted that Wiggles was coming, came out with a white plume-headed cockatoo perched on his arm. It was about the size of a crow, easily big enough to give Wiggles an alarming peck. The handler knelt down so that Wiggles could get a closer look, while John kept a tight hold on the leash. Wiggles stared up curiously at the big, snowy bird, who seemed unruffled, even disinterested. Wiggles sniffed the air, trying to get a read on this odd feathery thing. He seemed genuinely interested but not overly excited, a level of interest perhaps akin to what a museumgoer might feel while observing an educational diorama about dinosaurs.

Contented, relaxed, and tired: After a full day of activity, Wiggles takes a well-deserved rest.

“You ever see something like that?” John said to Wiggles, who began leaning in to the leash, trying to get at the bird, whining. The handler stood up and pulled the bird away from Wiggles’ reach.

“He did have a reaction to that bird, but it wasn’t necessarily a negative reaction,” John observed. “He was just curious. So far so good.”

Then the handler got another bird, this time a green parrot, and knelt down close to Wiggles.

But Wiggles seemed increasingly less interested, as if he were being asked to perform a trick without a reward.

“He’s losing his focus, which is good,” John said. “He’s not so aroused, not just going after the bird, going, going, going, like he did with the cat.”

Though he was unaware that he was taking a test, Wiggles passed it anyway. He could tolerate close contact with large birds without reverting to undesirable behaviors—the huge, hungry chomp, the puff of bright feathers, the grinning gulp.

Now Wiggles had to confront a situation similar to the one in his potential future home—more than one bird at a time. John walked him into a different part of the aviary, where the cages were filled with smaller birds in larger numbers—cockatiels, finches, lovebirds, parakeets—and the air rang with the sounds of a tropical rain forest.

“Whaddya think, Mister Wiggles? Huh?” John said. “Look at all these birdies!”

John was holding Wiggles in his arms, and the dog seemed surprisingly calm and curious, not frantic, like he was with the cat. He was not even licking his chops.

Wiggles passed the bird test with, so to speak, flying colors. (In fact, he did better than John.) Despite the diminishing odds, it was possible that Wiggles may just have succeeded in finding a real home.

HOME AT LAST

Wiggles’ new family, a woman named Chequeta and her young daughter, had driven all the way from Colorado to meet Wiggles in person. When the woman got out of her SUV holding the little girl, Wiggles came bounding up, lopsidedly, to greet them. The little girl clearly loved this, and she broke free of her mother to run after the dog for more.

“Ever since I first saw his picture on the Internet, something about him just touched my heart,” Chequeta said.

Betsy was trying to give Chequeta a preview of the little dog she had grown so attached to, but she was having difficulty keeping from crying. “He falls, sometimes a lot, just depends on the day,” she said. “He’s just great, you’re going to love him, though!” She pulled out a small package of Kleenex, and then the two women embraced.

“I’m so in love!” Wiggles’ new mom gushed. “It’s almost like that feeling you get when you have your first baby. It’s kind of, I don’t know—your heart jumps out of your chest.”

Betsy had Wiggles in her arms. She hugged and kissed him as she lifted him into the crate in the back of his new family’s car. Wiggles gave her a couple of big, slobbery kisses with his enormous, black-spotted tongue. “Bye, buddy,” she said, choking up, as she closed the hatchback. As the car pulled away, and Wiggles’ new owner waved, Betsy couldn’t resist calling after him one more time, “I love you, buddy!”

Then the car went bumping down the dusty road away from Dogtown, bound for a place where Wiggles would be accepted as himself—bowlegs, underbite, incontinence, and all—for the rest of his life.

W
hen people ask me what type of dog they should get, I always say, “Find one who fits your lifestyle. If you’re active, get a dog that can be active with you. If you’re a couch potato, a low-energy dog is probably more your speed.” Lifestyle compatibility is important, which is something I learned the hard way when I got my first dog during vet school. I wasn’t really ready and had a lot to learn about how to be a better friend to her. But her patience and trust never flagged, and it helped me to live the life I always wanted.

Dogs have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. My family’s first dog was a big (or at least big to a little kid) male German shepherd named Captain. I was just a kid when he lived with us, so my memories are few. I do remember him wrestling with my dad on the carpet and stinking up the Orange Submarine (an old VW van) with his dog breath. When he died, it was the first time I ever saw my mom cry. He was my parents’ first child, after all.

Shortly after Captain passed away, when I was about seven years old, we went to the local pound to get a new dog. We picked out a little black Lab mix who we named Benjamin. His name quickly morphed into Benji. (I remember being disappointed that my dog’s name was really unoriginal for its time, the 1970s—it was the same as the famous little movie dog.) Soon enough, my dad, who had a knack for giving nicknames, started calling him Benji Bo, and then finally settled on Bimbo (a name I much preferred because it actually had some flair). But Bimbo was my dog mostly in name. For the first few years, my mom took care of him.

I really began to learn how much a dog can add to your life around the time I entered junior high. It wasn’t an easy time for me—I grew shyer, lost whatever athletic skills I had, and sort of became a nerd. But Bimbo kept me company during my pubescent loneliness, and as we spent more time together, I began to take on more responsibility for his care. Mom didn’t have to walk him because I would. (Oddly, he would go for only one walk a day. When I tried to take him on two, he would just sit down on the front porch and not budge.) Bimbo shared my love for soccer, and we played together almost every day in the backyard. I didn’t recognize it at the time, but all this shared activity strengthened our bond. Bimbo became my best friend, and I owe him a great debt for getting me through the personal hell that was junior high.

But after high school, my relationship with Bimbo changed when I left for college. I missed him a lot (my parents even had a picture of him blown up to poster size for a Christmas present). Every vacation, I looked forward to seeing Bimbo again and falling back into our old routine. But as the years rolled by and I was away from home for longer periods of time, I could see Bimbo’s alliances shift back over to my parents. We still had good vacations together, but things had changed. After I graduated from college and then moved on to veterinary school, Bimbo was more my parents’ dog again.

I didn’t have my own dog again until my time in vet school. I wasn’t really looking for a pet—school was demanding enough—but things changed for me when we started performing surgery. In the beginning, we did only the simplest procedures—usually spaying and neutering animals from the local humane society (the local shelters donated animals to be “fixed” in return for our free services). My first surgery was a spay on a two-year-old Dalmatian, and like a lot of my classmates, I wound up adopting the first animal I ever operated on.

Her name was Dottie. I had known Dalmatians before and didn’t really care for them, but this dog sucked me in. Before I adopted her, I tried to get to know her better. The first impressions were great. I needed to make sure she was safe around cats because I had one, Stimpy, at home. Dottie and a friend’s adopted surgery cat got along fine, so I thought she’d be great with Stimpy, too. Dottie also seemed to respond really well to her name, which made me decide to keep it (even though it was thoroughly unoriginal—to this day my wife makes fun of my animal-naming ability because of my calling my Dalmatian Dottie). Dottie seemed to like other animals—she got along well with my roommate’s dog when they were first introduced. The humane society also assured me that Dottie was very sweet and not prone to snapping or biting. Little did I know that Dottie was pulling a fast one.

After I adopted Dottie, she revealed her crankier side. First of all, she didn’t like cats very much, something Stimpy easily could have told me. As far as her name went, I had assumed it had belonged to her since puppyhood, but it turned out that the humane society had tritely named her Dottie because of her breed. After the adoption, Dottie’s name ceased to hold any meaning for her when she was misbehaving. “Dottie? Dottie who?” her expression would say whenever I tried to get her attention away from something that she was not supposed to be paying attention to. As to her sweet and gentle nature, well, let’s say that several cats, dogs, and mailmen have been on the other end of Dottie’s moods, and they would hardly call her sweet.

But I couldn’t be angry with Dottie for misleading me about her attributes because I wasn’t such a great catch either. The first two years Dottie and I were together, I was so busy working 14 hours a day (it was my last year of vet school and was followed by a year-long internship) that I spent very little time with my high-energy dog. Dottie was definitely frustrated with me, and it showed. But Dottie remained patient and optimistic, hoping that things would change. She didn’t give up on me (even though I’m sure it crossed her mind).

After my internship year I moved out to the Portland, Oregon, area. My work hours decreased dramatically, so Dottie and I spent more time together. Since Dottie didn’t like most dogs (and some people), we needed to keep her on a leash when we went exploring. This was cumbersome to our adventures, so I started to look for places where she could safely run free. A work colleague would often talk about hikes he took in the area. They sounded interesting, and I figured it would be great to take Dottie. I had never hiked before, but how hard could it be?

Well, I found out on our first hike. Dottie and I climbed about halfway up the mountain, and I about died. It should have been no surprise; I was in horrible shape, was wearing jeans, and had brought very little water. Dottie had no trouble, but I was gasping for air with every step. Despite the challenge of it all, it was a blast.

I had found a new passion, one that I could share with Dottie, and I became obsessed with hiking with my dog. I would buy the best gear for me and for Dottie (who realistically only cared about the hiking, the water, and finishing my apple). Dottie loved it; I loved it; and we both got in very good shape and developed a very tight and loving bond. We hiked over a thousand miles in Oregon, and every one was unique and special. When my wife, Elissa, and I moved to Utah, Dottie and I kept up our hiking habit. We still liked our hikes, but it wasn’t like our heyday in Oregon (Utah is much hotter, with a lot less water to help Dottie cool off). Plus, as Dottie aged, her body couldn’t carry her as far anymore.

Now, Dottie is quite old (at least 15), stumbles when she walks, gets lost easily, and has very little endurance. She still enjoys her short jaunts behind our house, but even those are becoming a struggle. She is annoyed at her younger, faster, and more obnoxious siblings (she lives with five other dogs, three of whom are quite young) but does a reasonable job of tolerating them. I imagine that she has told them stories of her glory days and has told them they will never have the connection that she and I have—she is sort of a diva and does not really care about hurting the other dogs’ feelings.

Looking back at when Dottie came into my life, it was a bad idea for me to adopt her then because my lifestyle was not suited to a dog like her: I was irresponsible and impatient; I did not have the time to care for a dog properly; I was wrapped up in my education and career. I gave Dottie a limited life those first two and a half years, and I am not proud of that. Because Dottie stuck it out with me, I was finally able to see what she needed, and, realistically, what I needed, too. When I was a kid, those backyard romps and daily walks with Bimbo had cemented our friendship. I needed to give Dottie the same chances to see what activities would cement ours. I found ways to work Dottie into my life and make it richer because of her presence, something we both benefited from.

I can’t say that she didn’t frustrate me now and then, either, but we worked through it. After she bit the mailman, I learned to be much more careful when opening the front door. After she bit the cat, we reorganized our household so that wouldn’t happen again. She couldn’t really help but be who she was—flaws and all. But she helped me to grow up and become the man that I am today. Through Dottie I have learned that dogs need to be dogs. They need to have things offered to them that fit their personalities. Because I finally figured that out, I believe we shared some of the best times a person and a dog could have. Dottie did not fit the lifestyle I was living when she came into my life, but she helped me find the life I wanted to live. I eventually shared a connection with my dog that enriched my life in every way.

Thanks, Dottie.